And now for two months they had been seeing each other every few
days.

Thus by the working out of vast forces, the lives of Gabriella and
David had been jostled violently together. They were the children
of two revolutions, separate yet having a common end: she produced
by the social revolution of the New World, which overthrew
mediaeval slavery; he by the intellectual revolution of the Old
World, which began to put forth scientific law, but in doing this
brought on one of the greatest ages of religious doubt. So that
both were early vestiges of the same immeasurable race evolution,
proceeding along converging lines. She, living on the artificial
summits of a decaying social order, had farthest to fall, in its
collapse, ere she reached the natural earth; he, toiling at the
bottom, had farthest to rise before he could look out upon the
plains of widening modern thought and man's evolving destiny.
Through her fall and his rise, they had been brought to a common
level. But on that level all that had befallen her had driven her
as out of a blinding storm into the church, the seat and asylum of
religion; all that had befallen him had driven him out of the
churches as the fortifications of theology. She had been drawn to
that part of worship which lasts and is divine; he had been
repelled by the part that passes and is human.




XVI